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Revision of ODF History from Mon, 2006-08-28 20:28

A long Tradition of Openness: The History of ODF

The OpenDocument format has a long tradition of openness. The first
work on the file format started as early as 1999. Right from the
beginning ODF was designed as an open and implementation neutral file
format.

The open specification process started in 2000 with the foundation of
the OpenOffice.org open source project and the community efforts within
its XML development project. An even higher level of openness was
established in 2002 with the creation of the OASIS Open Office
Technical Committee (TC).

During the last seven years an increasing number of organizations and
companies joined the ODF specification process. In addition, a growing
number of applications implements the OpenDocument file format. Table 1
provides an overview about the history of the OpenDocument format.

Date / Time Frame

Event / Milestone

1999

The Development of an XML default file format
begins at StarDivision. Limitations of the old binary format and a need
for Unicode support trigger the change. The goal is to create an open
interoperable file format that can be used and implemented by other
vendors as well.

August 1999

Sun Microsystems, Inc. acquires StarDivision.

13 October 2000

The OpenOffice.org open source project gets
founded by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

13 October 2000

The XML community project gets setup on
OpenOffice.org with the goal to define the specification of the
OpenOffice.org XML file format as on open community effort.

* Introduction of XML namespaces that conform to the OASIS naming rules
* Switching from XML DTD's to Relax-NG as the schema language
* Improvements of the schema to better support the validation of
documents
* Adaptation of the schema to new versions of standards
* Adaptations for additional office applications (KOffice)
* Adaptations for new office application versions (OpenOffice.org 2.0)
* Removal of inconsistencies in the specification
* Error corrections

December 2004

A second committee draft gets approved, and the
tile of this draft gets changed from “OASIS Open Office Specification”
to “OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument)”

The third file format specification draft
including public review feedback gets approved as a committee draft.

May 2005

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) gets approved as an
OASIS standard.

September 2005

Sun Microsystems releases StarOffice 8 with ODF
support.

September 2005

ODF gets submitted to ISO.

September 2005

INdT (research group belonging to Nokia)
contributes ODF filters for Abiword and Gnumeric.

October 2005

OpenOffice.org 2.0 gets released with ODF support.

October 2005

Sun issues a patent covenant statement:

“Sun's public non-assertion declaration may be summarized unofficially
as an irrevocable covenant not to enforce any of its enforceable U.S.
or foreign patents against any implementation of the OASIS OpenDocument
specification”
(http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2005-10-04-a.html)

December 2005

Softmaker releases Textmaker 2006 with ODF
support.

January 2006

IBM releases IBM Workplace with ODF support.

March 2006

The ODF Alliance gets founded with 35 founding
members in order to promote ODF in the public sector.

March 2006

The OASIS ODF Adoption TC gets founded.

April 2006

KOffice 1.5 which uses ODF as the default file
format gets released.

May 2006

ISO approves ODF as ISO/IEC 26300.

June 2006

The ODF Alliance has already more than 200
members incl. companies and organizations like BBC, Corel, EDS, EMC,
IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Oracle, Software AG, Sun Microsystems, and the
City of Vienna.